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E. A. FREEMAN. 



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THE OFFICE 



OY THE 



HISTOEICAL PEOFESSOE. 



THE 

OFFIOE OF THE HISTOMOAL 
PEOFESSOR 

Hn Inaugural ^lecture 

EEAD IN THE MUSEUM AT OXFORD 

October 15, 1884 



EDWARD AffesEMAN, M.A.,HoN. D.C.L.,LL.D. 

EEGIUS PEOFESSOR OP MODERN" HISTORY 
FELLOW OP ORIEL COLLEGE 
HONORARY FELLOW OF TRINITY COLLEGE 




MAGMILLAN AND CO. 

1884 

[All rights reserved ] 



^b 



\ 



cb^^ 



- INAUGURAL LECTURE. 

Ix coming forward for the first time, as I do 
to-da}^, to fulfil the new duties which the highest 
power in the land has laid upon me, I cannot forget 
how soon mj first words necessarily come after 
the last words of the renowned scholar in whose 
place I find myself. It is indeed matter of re- 
joicing for us all that his last words were last 
words only in an official sense. Our guide is taken 
from us, and yet not wholly taken from us. Called 
to other and higher duties, we feel sure that he 
will not forget the studies of his earlier life ; we 
feel sure that he will still be ready, from time 
to time, to stretch out a helping hand to those 
whose main work still lies in the fields where 
his own once lay. And readiest of all, I would 
fain hope, he will be to stretch forth a hand to 
him who feels it his hio-hest honour to stand 



6 THE OFFICE OF THE 

in his place, and to stand in it, I ma}^ make 
bold to say, with his good will and something 
more. And yet the fact in which we all rejoice 
that he in whose place I stand still lives and 
flourishes does but in some sort heighten the 
natural difficulties of my first appearance before 
you. I am thereby driven into more direct com- 
parison than I otherwise might have been with 
one mth whom comparison is indeed dangerous. 
You have to hear my inaugural professions, while 
what I may call the exaugural confessions of the 
Bishop of Chester have as yet hardly passed from 
3^our ears. Let me only hope that, if I ever 
have the same privilege as he had, of parting 
from you, hardly, like him, to new duties, but 
when the time may come for me to lay all official 
duties aside, I may be able to make as good a 
confession as he made. I would fain hope that, 
when the time comes, I may part from you with 
as cheerful a confidence as his, that I may, like 
him, feel that I have at least done my best, and 
that you— or those who may then represent you 



HISTOEIOAL PKOFESSOE. 7 

here— have at least accepted the will, perhaps 
even, as in his case, the deed also. 

There is one point of difference, whether I am 
to count it as a difference for gain or loss, between 
him who now speaks and him who spoke last in 
the same character, which comes strongly home 
to me when I am tempted to glance, as he did, at 
the history of the post in which I am called to 
succeed him. As a rule, the younger succeeds 
the elder. It is by a rather singular lot that I 
am called on to take the place which has been 
held in succession by two living men, by two 
personal friends, by two of the men of whom 
among all living men I think most highly, but 
to neither of whom can I look up with that par- 
ticular form of reverence which we feel towards 
our elders and official teachers. Of the last two 
holders of this chair, the latter is certainly younger 
than I am by a few years, as even the former is by 
a few days. And this fact, a disadva-ntage truly 
in many ways, is no small advantage when I come 
to look back at times before either of them was 



« THE OFFICE OF THE 

Called to it. My academic memory goes back 
further than that of the Bishop of Chester, and I 
cannot mourn that it does so. There can be but 
few here who can remember, as I can, listenins: to 
lectures from a Regius Professor of Modern Histor}^ 
more than two-and-forty years ago. But those 
whose memor}^ carries them so far back will as- 
suredly not have forgotten the time when they 
listened to the voice of Arnold. Of that great 
teacher of historic truth, that greater teacher of 
moral right, I can speak as one wholly free 
from local, traditional, or personal bias. I was 
not one of his pupils or of his followers. I never 
spoke to him ; I never heard him speak save 
with his official voice in the well-filled Theatre. 
And yet I am bound to honour him as a master 
in a sense in which I can honour no other. On 
one side I have learned more from him than I have 
learned even from my Right Reverend predecessor. 
For of Arnold I learned what history is and how 
it should be studied. It is with a special thrill 
of feeling that I remember that the chair which 



HISTORICAL PBOFESSOR. 9 

I hold is his chair, that I venture to hope that 
my work in that chair may be in some sort, at 
whatever distance, to go on waging a strife which 
he began to wage. It was from him that I learned 
a lesson, to set forth which, in season and out of 
season, I have taken as the true work of my life. 
It was from Arnold that I first learned the truth 
which ought to be the centre and life of all 
our historic studies, the truth of the Unity of 
History. If I am sent hither for any special 
object, it is, I hold, to proclaim that truth, but to 
proclaim it, not as my own thought, but as the 
thought of my great master. It is a responsibility 
indeed to be the successor, even after so many 
years, of one who united so many gifts. New 
light has been thrown on many things since his 
day; but it surely ill becomes any man of our time 
who, by climbing on Arnold's shoulders, has learned 
to see further than Arnold himself could see, to 
throw the slightest shade of scorn upon so vener- 
able a name. Surely never did any man put forth 
truths so high and deep in words so artlessly and 



lO THE OFFICE OF THE 

yet SO happily chosen. If he were nothing more 
than the teller of a tale in the English tongue, 
he would take his place as one who has told a 
stirring tale as few could tell it. It was something 
to make us quiver at the awful vision of Hannibal, 
and to show us Marcellus lying dead on the name- 
less hill. It was a higher calling to show, as no 
other has shown, that history is a moral lesson. 
In every page of his story Arnold stands forth 
as the righteous judge, who, untaught by the more 
scientific historical philosophy of later days, still 
looked on crime as no less black because it was 
successful, and who could acknowledge the rights 
even of the weak against the strong. But more 
than all for my immediate purpose, Arnold was 
the man who taught that the political history of 
the world should be read as a single whole, who 
taught that the true life of the tale, the true profit 
of the teaching, should not be made void and of 
none effect by meaningless and unnatural divisions. 
It was he who taught us that what, in his own 
words, is " falsely called ancient history," is in 



HISTORICAL PROFESSOR. IT 

truth the most truly modern, the most truly living, 
the most rich in practical lessons for every suc- 
ceeding age. From him I learned that teaching ; 
it will be my highest aim, in the place in which 
I am now set, to hand that teaching on to others. 
If I can do ought to break down the middle wall 
of partition that is against us — if I can do ought 
to make men feel more deeply that so-called " an- 
cient" history without "modern" is a foundation 
useless for lack of a superstructure, that so-called 
" modern " history without " ancient " is a super- 
structure ready to fall for lack of a foundation — 
if I can brine: home to men's minds that the 
patriarchs of our own folk, the Angul and Dan of 
the old legend, the mythical representatives of our 
"speech, our laws, our whole historic being, are as 
'such the equal brethren of Hellen and Latinus — 
if I can bring but one of you to work, as I have 
ever worked, with the kindred records side by 
side, with the fates of one branch of the house 
ever called in to throw the needful light on the 
fates of the other branch — if I can bring but one 



12 THE OFFICE OF THE 

to trace out with me the work of Kleisthenes, of 
Licinius, of Simon of Montfort, as parts of one 
living whole, a whole of which every stage needs 
to be grasped by the same faculties, to be studied 
by the same methods— then indeed I shall have 
done the work that I have come to do ; but I 
shall have done it only as the loyal follower of 
the master who being dead yet speaketh, if onl}^ 
by the mouth of a distant successor. 

I have paid my homage where homage from a 
holder of this chair is due chiefest and first of 
all. But there are others, others of whom I have 
already spoken, of whom, living though they are, 
I still feel that I have not yet said all that is 
their due. Arnold was taken from us too soon, 
taken in the fulness of his strength, when he 
had indeed done much, but when much more, 
above all in this place, might have been looked 
for from him. He was lost to us ; but worthy 
successors were in time to fill his place. Again, 
after a season, his chair passed to a memorable 
man. Jt passed to one who had indeed drunk in 



HISTOEICAL PEOFESSOE. I3 

the spirit of Arnold, to one who knew, as few 
have known, to grasp the truth that history is 
but past politics and that politics are but present 
history. It passed to a scholar, a thinker, a 
master of the English tongue, to one too who is 
something nobler still, to one whom we may 
fairly call a prophet of righteousness. The name 
of Goldwin Smith is honoured in two hemispheres, 
honoured as his name should be who never feared 
the face of man, wherever there was truth to be 
asserted or wrong to be denounced. He went 
forth from us of his own will ; but it was but to 
carry his light to another branch of our own folk, 
and it may be more graceful in us, if we do not 
so much regret our own loss as congratulate the 
kindred lands to which he is gone. And in ab- 
sence he yet teaches us ; some truths have perhaps 
become clearer to him on the other side of Ocean 
than they could ever have been in our elder 
world. Not the least among his many services to 
truth and to right reason has been done within 
this very year. He has taught us, in one of those 



14 THE OFFICE OF THE 

flitting papers which, when they come from him, 
speak volumes, where to look for the true Expan- 
sion of England. His keen eye has seen it, not in 
the spread of " empire," but in the spread of that 
which is the opposite to empire — not in the mere 
widening of dominion — an Eastern despot could 
do that — but in that higher calling which free Eng- 
land in the later world has shared with free Hellas 
in the elder. He has taught us the meaning of 
words, the realities of things ; he has taught us to 
see, if not a " Greater Britain," yet a newer England, 
in the growth of new ]ands of Englishmen, new 
homes of the tongue and law of England, lands 
which have become more truly colonies of the 
English folk because they have ceased to be pro- 
vinces of the British Crown. 

And one more tribute, not the last, I feel sure, 
by many, to him in whose immediate place I 
stand, my predecessor in the University and in one 
college, my successor in early days in another. 
In those early days I may, I think, fairly claim 
that I was the first to grasp more fully than others 



HISTORICAL PROFESSOR. 1 5 

all that was in him, to see in him something more 
than the clever men whom we meet with daily, 
to pick him out as one with whom his first class 
and his fellowship were not the ending but the 
beginning of his career. It seems not so many 
years since I was often asked, sometimes by men 
who deemed themselves specially learned, who 
this Stubbs might be of whom I ta,lked so much 
but of whom nobody else had heard. No one 
will ask that now of the historian of the English 
Constitution, the enlightening spirit of the Eccle- 
siastical Courts Commission, and beyond all these, 
the man who has drawn the life-like portrait of 
Henry the Second, and who has thereby shown 
that he has a call before other men to draw a 
life-like portrait of Henry the Eighth. I have 
had in my life the honour and advantage of 
knowing not a few wise and learned men, some 
who have passed away from us, some who are 
still among us. Among them two stand forth 
before all others ; one of my own time of life, 
the other of an older generation ; one an intimate 



l6 THE OFFICE OF THE 

friend of many years, the other a master at whose 
feet I deemed it a privilege to sit now and then 
as a humble listener. To those two I can honestly 
pay a special tribute which I can hardly pay to 
any other. Among many of whom I have learned, 
those two, the late Bishop of Saint David's and 
the present Bishop of Chester, Connop Thirlwall 
and William Stubbs, stand forth as the two from 
whom one might alwa^^s learn without any need 
to doubt or stumble at what one learned of them. 
Others may know how to tell a more popular 
tale, others may indulge in more brilliant feats 
of the imagination ; of none other can I say, as 
I can say of each of them, that his minute 
accuracy never fails and his impartial judgement 
never swerves. In a long and careful study of 
the Bishop of Chester's writings, I will not say 
that I have always agreed with every inference 
that he has drawn from his evidence ; but I can 
say that I have never found a flaw in the state- 
ment of his evidence. If I have now and then 
lighted on something that looked like oversight, 



HISTOEICAL PROFESSOR. 1 7 

I have always found in the end that the over- 
siofht was mine and not his. After five-and- 
thirty years' knowledge of him and his works, 
I can say without fear that he is the one man 
among living scholars to whom one may most 
freely go as to an or icle, that we may feel more 
sure with him than with any other that in his 
answer we cany away words of truth which he 
must be rash indeed who calls in question. 

Standing then in the place of such men as 
these, of predecessors whom we have not wholly 
lost but to whom I can still look as friends 
and fellow-workers, I feel the responsibility, the 
burthen of my new office the more keenly. It 
is no small matter, at an age when the best part 
of one's days is gone, to be carried away to a 
wholly new manner of life, to begin a career at 
a time when one who had begun it earlier might 
fairly think of withdrawing from it. To that 
work then I am the more bound to give the 
fulness of such powers as I have because I am 
likely to have a shorter time than others to do 

G 



1 8 THE OFFICE OF THE 

it in. In such a post as mine, each man will have 
his own way of doing things, and he will do his 
work the better, if he does it in his own way, 
the way which his own nature and his own 
studies lead him to. In this case, in defiance of 
Aristotle and Aristotle's teacher, I venture to 
think that there may be more good ways than one. 
I feel sure that my two illustrious predecessors 
must have done their work, each admirably, but 
in utterly different ways. And I feel sure that 
each of them did his work the better for doing 
it in his own way, and not trying to follow the 
way of some other man. To them, as well as 
to our teachers of past days, I may apply the 
words which Cicero applies to the great orators 
whom he followed — *' omnes inter se dissimiles 
fuerunt, sed ita tamen ut neminem sui vehs esse 
dissimilem ^." And I trust it is not presumptuous 
in me to say that I feel sure that my way of 
doing the work will also be different from that 
of any who have gone before me, and moreover 

* De Oratore, iii. 7. 



HISTOKICA.L PEOFESSOR. 1 9 

that I shall do that work all the better if I do 
it in my own way and do not try to copy the 
way of any of those who have gone before me. 
I need not tell you that I come back to the 
University after many years, and those years full 
of great changes. I need not say that much in 
the present teaching and administration of this 
place is altogether new and strange to me. Of 
its examinations I once knew something, but even 
then I found the course of change to be so fast 
that, each time that I was appointed Examiner, 
I had to learn my trade afresh; my experience 
from the former time had already become a 
matter of ancient history. Of teaching in the 
strict sense, in the University or out of it, I 
have had no experience whatever, unless any one 
chooses to count two terms' possession, eight-and- 
thirty years back, of a lowly office in my own 
college, an office which the progress of reform has 
since swept away. In the art of preparing — I 
will not use the ugly word cramming — an under- 
graduate for his class or for his pass the last 

C 2 



20 THE OFFICE OF THE 

bachelor wlio has won his own class or his own 
pass is necessarily more skilful than I am. But 
I do not feel that my lack of experience of this 
kind is necessarily a disadvantage ; every man 
has his own line of duty, and it seems to me, 
strange as I believe the doctrine will sound in 
some ears, that to prepare men for examinations 
is no part of the duty of a Professor in such a 
subject as mine. Duties he has, and no small 
ones ; but they are, as I hold, duties of quite 
another kind from even the widest and most 
liberal form of teaching into which the thought 
of success or failure in an examination is ever 
allowed to enter. 

There is surely a certain lurking fallacy in 
the word "Professor." The name surely means 
wholly different things according to the subjects 
to which it is applied. It surely implies a dif- 
ferent relation to the Professor's subject, accord- 
ing to the nature of that subject, or rather 
perhaps according to the position of that sub- 
ject among the studies of the University. When 



HISTOEICAL PROFESSOR. 21 

a subject, for whatever cause, is studied by a 
few only, when the Professor is perhaps the 
only teacher of the subject in the University, 
I should conceive that, while it is his duty to 
stand forth as a representative of the highest 
learning in his subject, it must also be his duty 
to bend himself, if need be, to the humblest 
form of its teaching. A Professor of Arabic, 
while master of a mighty literature from which 
I daily mourn that I am shut out, must also, 
I imagine, be ready to teach the Arabic alpha- 
bet, even, if need be, to a brother-professor. No 
such duty lies on a professor of that which is alike 
the oldest and the newest speech of European 
freedom; none such lies on a professor of the 
undying tongue of Empire, the tongue of the 
consuls, the CaBsars, and the pontiffs. A pro- 
fessor of Greek must, I assume, be master 
alike of every stage and every phase of that 
still living speech, from the song of Homer to 
the song of Rhegas, from the prose of Heka- 
taios to the prose of Trikoupes. A professor 



22 THE OFFICE OF THE 

of Latin, I assume, must be alike at home in 
every page of the long life of the Imperial 
tongue, from the song of the Arval Brethren 
to the hymns of Bernard of Clairvaux, from the 
sharp sayings exchanged between Nsevius and 
the Metelli to those yet more memorable Satur- 
nians in which the nameless poet of the thir- 
teenth century set forth the earliest platform of 
Parliamentary Reform. Nay, it might hardly 
be unreasonable if we even asked him to begin 
a fresh journey from the oath of Strassburg, 
if we called on him to trace the fates of the 
children as well as of the parent, to trace them 
even to the most wayward shapes which the 
speech of Latium has put on by the springs of 
the Rhine or by the mouths of the Danube. 
Each alike, he who represents Greek and he 
who represents Latin, is surely set in his place 
to be the representative of the widest and the 
deepest, the oldest and the newest, learning that 
can bear on the history of the undying tongue 
that forms his subject. But they are spared 



HISTORICAL PROFESSOR. 23 

the lowlier duties which I conceive that a pro- 
fessor of Arabic or Chinese must combine with 
a learning no less deep and wide of the tongue 
that forms his subject. And so, I take it, it must 
be with the professor of every subject which has 
many followers in this place and of which there 
;are many teachers besides himself. If I may so 
:far magnify an office in which I am myself a 
sharer, I would say that a professor of any of 
the great branches of study in this place should 
hold a place something like that which the prince 
held in the view of Tiberius Csesar^ The prince 
was not called on to discharge the duties of an 
sedile, a praetor, or a consul; so the Professor is 
not called on to discharge the duties of a college 
tutor or a private tutor. "Majus aliquid et 
excelsius a professore postulatur." His business 
is, not to make men qualified for classes and 
fellowships, but to be the representative of that 
to which classes and fellowships, if they are not 
to be wholly useless and mischievous, are simply 

1 Tac. Ann. iii. 53. 



24 THE OFFICE OF THE 

means. His place is to be the representative of 
learning. He should stand ready to be the 
helper, if need be, to be the guide, of any, old 
or young, be they freshmen or be they doctors, 
who, in days like these, between the frenzy of 
amusements and the frenzy of examinations, can 
still find a few stray hours to seek learning for 
its own sake. But before all other classes he 
will welcome the younger graduates, those who 
have already learned something, but who still 
have much to learn, and among them he will 
specially welcome those who have undertaken the 
work of teaching in his own subject. He and 
they are ahke teachers, though teachers of different 
kinds, and his experience in the art of teaching 
himself may make him of some use to them in 
the art of teaching others. But his own calling 
is different from theirs. He must be ready, in 
set discourses, to show forth whatever, in his 
own researches or in the researches of others, he 
may deem most fitting to suggest thoughts as 
well as to supply facts to his hearers. But he 



HISTORICAL PROFESSOR. 2$ 

will not confine himself to this more easy, 
more showy, perhaps both to himself and to his 
hearers more taking work. He must not forget 
the most solid business of his calling. He must 
ever bear in mind himself, and he must ever strive 
to impress on the minds of others, that the most 
ingenious and the most eloquent of modern his- 
torical discourses can after all be nothing more 
than a comment on a text. All that he can say 
of his own thinking, even all that the newest 
German book can tell him, will after all be but 
illustrations of those original authorities without 
a sound and thorough knowledge of whose texts 
all our finest talk is but shadow without sub- 
stance. To the law and to the testimony, to the 
charter and to the chronicle, to the abiding records 
of each succeeding age, writ on the parchment or 
graven on the stone — it is to these that he must 
go himself and must guide others. He must him- 
self toil, and as far as in him lies, he must con- 
strain or beguile others to toil with him, at that 
patient study of contemporary texts, of contem- 



26 THE OFFICE OF THE 

porary monuments, which to some minds seems 
a good deal less taking than the piling together 
of theories to be upset the next day by some 
other theory. He must work to lay the founda- 
tion; when the foundation is once laid on the 
rock of original research, a superstructure may be 
raised on it which may live through a good many 
blasts and storms of controversy. But he who 
without a foundation builds on the sands of 
theory, he who rushes at a difficult and contro- 
versial period with no knowledge of the periods 
that went before it or of the periods that came 
after it, he who conceives of events, not as they 
are reported by those who saw them, but as may 
be convenient for some favourite doctrine, political 
or theological, philosophical or artistic — against 
such as these our professor will hardly need to 
raise his voice of warning. He may spare himself 
the task ; he may leave events to take their 
course ; the house built on the sand will presently 
crumble of itself, without needing any special 
blasts and storms to sweep it away. 



HISTOKICAL PROFESSOR. 37 

It is, as you will see, a somewhat lofty standard 
that I have formed to myself of the professor's 
office. But it is only by aiming at the highest 
standard of all, at a standard which may be far 
above our reach, that we shall ever attain to the 
highest standard that is within our reach. In 
other words, the professor should be one who has 
at least striven to be a master in that branch of 
knowledge which he is called on to represent, and 
he should be ready to devote himself heart and 
soul to the advancement of knowledge, of know- 
ledge in the highest sense, in that branch. If he 
is not thus qualified, intellectually and morally, 
he is not fit to be professor at all. If he is thus 
qualified, he is surely fit to judge for himself how 
he can best promote the interests of that branch 
of knowledge. It is therefore surely a mistake 
to lay down a code of hai d and i nbending rules, 
not only for professors of this or that subject, but 
for all professors of all subjects. I cannot but 
think that my idea of a professor must be widely 
different from the idea which seems to have been 



28 THE 01 FICE OF THE 

entertained by the last reformers of the University. 
I can speak the more freely on this head, because 
the last reform was not a reform of our own 
making, lait a leform which was thrust upon 
us from outside. I had passed my life in the 
belief that an University ought to be, before 
all things, a seat of learning, or, if the word 
be liked better, a seat of research. And I had 
thought that for some years past the great 
object of reformers had been to make learning 
or research less difficult, perhaps even to make 
it, in a meaner sense, less unprofitable to its 
followers. Whoever dictated the ordinances of 
the last set of Commissioners must have thought 
otherwise. It is indeed hard to believe that the 
object of the Commission really was to do all 
that could be done for the hindrance of learning 
and for the humiliation of its official representa- 
tives. But, if such had been their objects, no one 
could have denied that they had adapted means 
to ends very skilfally. The ordinance seems to 
look on a professor, not as a representative of 



HISTORICAL PROFESSOR. 29 

learning, but as a mere teacher, as an usher, I 
might say, an usher too of a low moral standard, 
who will be likely to shirk his work unless he 
is bound down to it by minute and rigid rules. 
Nothing surely can be more likely than this to 
hinder the professor from giving full play to 
whatever powers he may have, nothing more 
likely to make him look on his work as a task 
and to keep him back from throwing himself into 
it heart and soul. It is, or lately was, the fashion 
to mock at the old founders of colleges for making 
strict and unbending statutes to control the dis- 
cipline and manner of life of their members. Yet 
here, as the last instalment of reform, as the newest 
developement of enlightenment, we have a set 
of professorial ordinances, ordinances almost as 
minute as the statutes of any founder of past ages, 
designed for the guidance, not of lads and their 
immediate teachers, but for men who, if they are 
not masters of the several branches of learning, 
are altogether out of their places. For a man 
who is what a professor ought to be, what I am 



30 THE OFFICE OF THE 

sure that not a fe^ of the professors in this place 
are, it is not exactly encouraging to tell him that 
he must give so many lectures at such and such 
times, that he must announce them beforehand at 
such and such times, that he must hold himself 
responsible to one Board and that he must take 
counsel with another. Will the members of the 
Boards forgive me if I tell them that as yet I 
feel towards them much as ApoUonios of Tyana 
felt when he had never seen a t}Tant, when he 
did not know how many heads a tyrant had, or 
what kinds of necks and teeth those heads might 
be furnished with^? But I am told that the 
Boards are much less terrible in real life than 
they seem in the bristling language of the ordi- 
nance. The good sense, no doubt, of their mem- 
bers hinders them from really being such thorns 
in the professor's side as it would seem that the 
authors of the ordinance meant them to be. But 
neither professor nor board can wipe out the 
ordinance, with all its petty and grotesque re- 

^ Philostratos, Life of ApoUonios, iv. 37. 



HISTORICAL PROFESSOB. 3 1 

strictions. Till some deliverer from outside steps 
in to undo the work of the invader from outside, 
we must bear our yoke as we can. 

An Oxford professor then in these days must 
work in fetters, but he may still work. And 
a professor of what is called "Modern History" 
may feel himself bound by fetters which seem 
to' be more firmly rivetted than those of any 
of his brethren. I need not tell you — I have 
already told you in this lecture— that I acknow- 
ledge no such distinction as that which is 
implied in the words "ancient" and "modern" 
history, "ancient" and "modern" languages, and 
the like. In the course of a life divided about 
equally between what are called " ancient " and 
what are called "modern" studies, I have never 
been able to find out the difierence between the 
two. I have never been able to find out by 
my own wit when " ancient " history ends and 
when "modern" history begins. And when I 
have asked others, when I have searched into 
the writings of others, I have found so little 



32 THE OFFICE OF THE 

agreement on the point that I have been myself 
none the wiser. A living friend once told me 
that modern history begins with the French 
Revolution, and I fancy that a good many people, 
at least in France, would gladly agree with his 
doctrine. On the other hand, Baron Bunsen held 
that modern history began with the Call of 
Abraham. These, I think, are the two extremes; 
but I have heard a good many intermediate 
points suggested. Those perhaps are wisest who 
decline to define at all; only the thought will 
follow that it might be wiser still not to draw 
a distinction which cannot be defined. At any 
rate the University has never ruled the point. 
In all the controversies of five-and- thirty years 
ago I never could get a definition of modern 
history. More than all, even the last set of 
Commissioners have not taken on them to defijie 
it. Even those who are so minute as to rule 
that the Professor of Modern History is to give 
exactly forty-two lectures in a year — they do 
not say how they propose to compel him to 



HISTOEICAL PROFESSOR. 33 

give forty-two good lectures — even they do not 
undertake to tell him what he is to lecture 
about. They tell him to lecture in "some part 
of modern history;" but they do not tell him 
what "modern history" is. It is surely open to 
him to accept either of the definitions which 
I have quoted. I should, I conceive, be strictly 
keeping within the four corners of the ordinance 
if I were to begin with the battle of four kings 
against Ryq, or again if I were to decline to 
touch any matter older than A.D. 1789. In short 
out of the very abundance of the Professor's 
fetters comes his means of escape. As to my 
subjects, at least I am free. But let no one 
fear that, because I am free, I am likely to 
make any raids on the domains of other pro- 
fessors of which they might reasonably com- 
plain. It is one of the dearest wishes of my 
heart to see this vain distinction where no real 
distinction is utterly wiped away from the legisla- 
tion of the University of Oxford, or even to see 
such promising approaches towards wiping it away 

D 



34 THE OFFICE OF THE 

which have been actually made in the University 
of Cambridge. At Cambridge there is now a tripos 
where, at the bidding of common sense, in the in- 
terest of sound learning, it is possible to take up 
Thucydides and Lambert of Herzfeld side by side. 
All honour then to our illustrious sister, and may 
we soon have the wisdom to follow in the track 
which she has opened. I will not at present enter 
with any fulness on a subject on which I trust 
to have other opportunities of speaking at greater 
detail. But I cannot help pointing out, now at the 
very beginning, that this unnatural division into 
" ancient " and " modern " hinders the great central 
fact of European history, the growth and the 
abiding of the power of Rome, from being ever set 
forth in all the fulness of its unity. The strange 
confusions which prevail in many minds with re- 
gard to the Empire in East and West, the utter 
blank which the whole subject is in many minds, 
come largely of this piecemeal way of looking at 
things which are simple enough if looked at as 
a whole, but which are utterly meaningless when 



HISTOEICAL PEOFESSOK. ^^ 

this and that fragment of the story is looked at 
apart from its fellows. No man can ever under- 
stand how truly the last Constantine was the suc- 
cessor of the first, how truly again the last Francis 
was the successor of the first Charles, unless he has 
fully taken in in what sense and through what 
stages Charles and Constantine alike had stepped 
into the place of Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus, 
consul, tribune, and pontiff" of the commonwealth 
of Rome. Or, look at the history of one of the 
noblest of the provinces of that commonwealth, 
of that illustrious island whose story is one of 
its brilliant times so closely interwoven with our 
own, look at Sicily, the meeting-place of the na- 
tions, the battle-field of creeds and races, where 
the strife between Aryan and Semitic man has 
been since fought out in all its fulness. That won- 
derful cycle of events loses all its historic life, if 
we look at one fragment of it only ; the strife with 
the Phoenician and the strife with the Saracen each 
loses half its meaning if either is parted from the 
other; Timoleon cannot hold his full historic 
D % 



3<5 THE OFFICE OF THE 

place apart from Roger, nor can Roger hold his 
place apart from Timoleon. But the mischief of 
this unnatural division where no real division is, 
is not confined to any one of the subjects of Uni- 
versity study; it affects our whole system to its 
very centre. We in the nineteenth century are 
called on to do a work of the same kind as that 
which was wrought by the scholars of the six- 
teenth century. They brought to light a new 
learning, a learning which seemed like the dis- 
covery of an elder world. We have to put all 
worlds and all learning, old and new, past and pre- 
sent, into their due relations towards one another. 
The sixteenth century found out the life and value 
of certain stages of the history and the languages 
of Greece and Italy; it is for the nineteenth 
to put those stages into their due relation to 
other stages in the history and the languages 
both of those lands and of other lands. The 
question is one which does not touch the study 
of political history only; it touches no lees the 
study of language and the study of art. We 



HISTORICAL PEOFESSOE. 2)1 

need here no "modern school," no "modern side ;" 
we need no school of so-called " modern" languages 
apart from " ancient/' we need no chair of so-called 
"classical" archaeology apart from the archaeology 
of other times. The warning that is now needed 
is a general one, and one which closely touches 
the very existence of Oxford or of any other 
University as a seat either of really sound learning 
or of really liberal teaching. Those studies which 
are the truest foundation of all studies, studies 
without which we may as well shut up our halls 
and schools and lecture-rooms altogether, studies 
which are misapplied only when it is forgotten 
that they are only the foundation and not the 
whole building, are daily threatened, daily mocked 
at, it may be by men who, as has been happily 
said, sometimes dissemble, it may be by the 
ignorant and presumptuous who deem themselves 
philosophers, and who even come to be so deemed 
by others. We ought to be ready with our 
answer to the gainsay ers, and, if we think good, 
we may make ourselves ready with it. Eut we 



38 THE OFFICE OF THE 

shall never be ready with it as long as we remain 
deaf to the teaching of the great discoveries of 
the age, as long as we take no heed to the new 
life thrown on all knowledge by the comparative 
method, as long in short as we obstinately part 
asunder "ancient" and "modern" history, "an- 
cient" and "modern" languages. We are told 
over and over again that the time is wasted 
which we spend on the teaching of what are 
called "dead" languages, that the time is wasted 
which we spend on the political communities of 
small physical extent in ages which are far dis- 
tant. Cavils like these are indeed only the cavils 
of ignorance and shallowness, but, as the world 
goes at present, they are cavils which need a 
practical answer. And our answer will never be 
so practical as it might be as long as we give 
an advantage to the enemy by keeping up these 
artificial barriers. We all, I trust, agree in holding 
that there are no tongues more truly living, no 
tongues which even now more deeply influence 
the speech and thoughts of men, than those older 



HISTOEICAL PROFESSOK. 39 

forms of the still abiding tongues of Greece and 
Italy which the unlearned and unbelieving think 
good to speak of as "dead." If they are 
dead, bury them; or at least leave them as 
a matter of curious study for those whose tastes 
may lead their studies in that direction. It 
is surely because they are not dead, because 
they are the most living and practical of all 
tongues, that we hold that they must still abide, 
as the foundation, as the corner-stone, as the 
crowning of the edifice, as the centre of all that 
is worthy of the name of culture or liberal educa- 
tion. But we make our ground less strong than 
we should make it, we leave our fortress more 
open to the assaults of ignorance, if we part the 
elder from the younger, if we part the parent 
from the children, if we fail to proclaim that our 
knowledge of any language is imperfect, unless we 
know both whence words come and whither they go. 
"Ancient languages," "modern languages," Latin 
to be learned with no regard to its later fruit of 
French— French to be learned without res*ard to 



40 THE OFFICE OF THE 

its parent stock of Latin— such a cruel severin^^ 
as this is indeed to betray one of our strongest 
outworks into the hands of the besiegers. If the 
sixteenth century made such a severance, it was 
neither wonderful nor blameworthy; but it is 
blameworthy indeed if we keep it on in the fuller 
light of the nineteenth. And as with language, 
so with political history. We shall never be able 
to make such answer as we ought to make to 
cavils about "small states," about "battles fought 
two thousand years ago," unless we boldly write 
on our banner the golden words of Arnold, to 
which I have referred already, when he speaks of 
"what is falsely called ancient history, the really 
modern history of Greece and Rome." One might 
think that the Roman Empire was big enough even 
for a declaimer against "petty states;" but we 
must take the cavillers on their own ground ; we 
must proclaim aloud that the history of those small 
states of a far distant age is, as the history of 
small states of a far distant age, an essential part 
of the study of man's progress, without which 



HISTORICAL PEOFESSOR. 41 

we shall never fully understand the workings of 
greater states in later times. We must proclaim 
that the real life of the history of those times 
lies not in its separation from the affairs of our 
own time, but in its close connexion with them. 
But this we cannot do in its fulness as long as 
we part asunder periods of history each of which 
loses half its value if it is looked at apart from 
the other. We cannot make our full defence as 
long as we condemn so-called "ancient" and so- 
called « modern " history to be taken up in 
distinct schools as wholly unconnected subjects, 
to be taught and lectured on by teachers and 
professors who stand in no kind of relation to 
one another. If we wish to keep our " ancient " 
history, our " ancient" languages, as an essential 
part of any sound and liberal teaching, we can 
do it only by letting the gainsayers know that 
the falsely called "ancient" studies are, as Ar- 
nold taught us forty years ago, the most truly 
" modern " of all. 

To me then the very title of a Professor of 



42 THE OFFICE OF THE 

" Modern " History is in itself a fetter. It is be 
sure made one degree less hard to bear because 
no attempt is made to define " modern " history, 
because it doubtless has been felt that it was 
impossible to define it. There is indeed one 
definition of " modern " history which I would 
gladly accept ; there is one point at which I 
would even be content to draw a hard and fast 
line between " ancient " and " modern." That 
point is one which is not quite so near to our own 
day as the French Revolution nor yet quite so 
far from it as the Call of Abraham. We may 
well agree to draw a line between " ancient" and 
"modern," if we hold our "modern" period to 
begin with the first beginnings of the recorded 
history of Aryan Europe, whether we place those 
beginnings at the first Olympiad or carry them 
back to any earlier time. There alone can we 
find a real starting-point; a line drawn at any 
later time is a mere artificial and unnatural break. 
It is then that for us, for the nations of Europe 
of our own day, the story of ourselves and of our 



HISTORICAL PROFESSOR. 



43 



kinsfolk begins. It is the beginning of our poli- 
tical being ; it is the beginning of tongues kindred 
to our own, tongues which still happily form the 
groundwork of all our studies. Then begins that 
one great and unbroken drama which takes in 
the long political history of European man, the 
history of the Greek and the Italian, the history 
of the Celt, the Teuton, and the Slave. By 
"modern" history then I should understand our 
own history in the widest sense, as distinguished 
from certain branches of history which are older 
than our own, and from certain other branches 
which, though contemporary with our own, are 
not our own. We, students of modern history, 
of the European history of perhaps the last seven- 
and-twenty centuries, should be among the first 
to welcome the vast additions which our own 
days have made to the knowledge of history which 
is truly ancient, of languages which are truly dead. 
While we claim the records of Athenian archons 
and Roman consuls as essentially parts of the same 
tale as the records of Venetian doges and English 



44 THE OFFICE OF THE 

kings, we welcome the recovered records of the Ac- 
cadian, the Assyrian, and the Hittite, as materials 
for a high and worthy study, but for a study which 
is not our own. The two studies are closely con- 
nected ; each may give good help to the other ; but 
Accadian history is helpful to EngHsh history, 
not as Latin or Hellenic history is helpful, but 
as anthropology, as palaeontology, as geology — 
studies all of them which deserve plain Teutonic 
names — are constantly found helpful. All these 
are helpful, indeed there is hardly any branch 
of knowledge which is not helpful to the true 
historian ; but they are helpful as distinct, though 
kindred, studies, not as parts of the same study. 
Beyond then the first beginnings of our " modern" 
history, there is a wide field of truly " ancient " 
history, of history which does not directly in- 
fluence the political life of modern Europe, but 
which is fully worthy of its place as a separate 
branch of knowledge, with its distinct students, its 
distinct teachers. And we, students and teachers 
of the history of living Europe, must give a 



HISTORICAL PROFESSOR. 45 

welcome yet more brotherly to all that advances 
the knowledge of those branches of history which 
are still living, though not European. We do 
not fully understand the history of the lands 
and nations which are our own, unless we know 
at least their relations to the lands, the nations, 
the tongues, the creeds, which have supplied the 
men of Aryan Europe with their immediate neigh- 
bours and rivals. The tale of Greece, the tale- of 
Italy, brings us at almost every page across the 
records of the Hebrew, the Phoenician, and the 
Arab. When in the palaces of Palermo we see 
the letters traced from right to left, traced at the 
bidding of Norman kings but by the hands of 
Saracenic craftsmen, when we see the sadder sight 
of legends in the same world-wide alphabet blot- 
ting out the mosaics of Justinian in the most 
glorious of Christian temples, we must indeed 
acknowledge that the teaching of Arabia has 
truly a history of its own, a history parallel to 
our own history, a history intertwined with our 
own history, but still distinct from it. Semitic 



46 THE OFFICE OF THE 

history, Arabian history above all, must have its 
distinct students and distinct teachers, yet it still 
is so closely connected with our own studies, that 
the votaries of either subject must at least know 
the main outlines of the other. The history of 
the Phoenician and the Arab and of those who 
have adopted the creed of the Ai'ab, must be 
known as the history of mighty and abiding 
rivals, not as part of the history of our own 
home and of our own folk. For this last we 
can acknowledge but one boundary either in space 
or in time. It spreads wherever men have spread 
themselves who have been brought under the 
political, the moral, or the religious influence of 
Rome, For its beginning we may not seek at 
any time more recent than our first glimpses of 
Rome's own Hellenic teacher. 

But in an imperfect world man must yield to 
circumstances. Vain and mischievous as is the 
distinction, yet as long as it is formally acknow- 
ledged in the University, as long as there are 
distinct schools, distinct professors, of "ancient" 



HISTORICAL PROFESSOR. 47 

and of " modern " history, and as long as the 
accepted sphere of the " ancient " professors takes 
in times much later than the first Olympiad, a 
professor of " modern " history must, if only under 
protest, try to put some meaning upon his quali- 
fying adjective, and to chalk out for himself some 
special sphere which will not bring him into any 
open clashing with his " ancient " colleagues. And 
I think that a boundary may be drawn between us 
which, better at least than some others, may serve 
as a fair temporary shift till the whole arrange- 
ments of the University as to the teaching of 
history and language are thoroughly recast in 
accordance with the advance of modern know- 
ledge. The fifth century of our sera, the period 
of the settlement of the Teutonic nations within 
the Empire, is one . of the most marked periods 
in the history of the world. It is of equal im- 
portance with the earlier period which in some 
sort balances it, the second century before our 
sera. The earlier time ruled that Kome should 
be the head of Europe ; it ruled what form 



48 THE OFFICE OF THE 

should be taken by her dominion ; the later time 
ruled what form her abiding influence should take 
in days when her political power was cut short 
and in many of her western provinces broken in 
pieces. The division is of course open to the ob- 
jection that, in any philosophical view of the 
course of events, the age which saw the first sack 
of Carthage and the age which saw the first sack 
of Rome answer to one another and cannot be 
parted asunder. That strong objections may be 
taken to this as to any other point of division is 
indeed the essence of my whole case; but, if a 
distinction must be drawn at some point, the point 
at which I propose to draw it seems open to 
fewer objections than most others. It is a real 
starting-point ; it is the time that saw the plant- 
ing of the germs of the great nations of Western 
Europe, the age which saw the settlement of the 
Goth in Spain, of the Burgundian and the Frank 
in Gaul, of the Angle and the Saxon in Britain. 
I may admit a secondary sense in which that age 
may be called the beginning of " modern " history, 



HISTOEICAL PROFESSOK. 49 

if only it is allowed that " ancient " history goes 
on alongside of it for a thousand years. That 
thousand years the professors of the two divisions 
vrill have in common, but they will look at them 
from different points of view. The "ancient" pro- 
fessor will look at them with the eyes of one 
whose home is fixed within the walls, first of 
the elder and then of the younger Eome. His 
" modern " colleague will look at it with the eyes 
of the younger nations, who have found them- 
selves dwellings on Koman soil, who in becoming 
conquerors have become disciples, who deem it 
their highest boast to deck their princes with the 
ensigns and the titles of the power whose political 
greatness they have overthrown. In other words, 
a Professor of Modern History, while he protests 
against the name, will still have a definite and 
intelligible function if he be understood to be a 
professor of the history of the Teutonic and Sla- 
vonic nations. He will do well to fix his ordinary 
limit at the point when Teutonic wandering 
changes into Teutonic settlement. Yet he may 



E 



50 THE OFFICE OF THE 

be forgiven if he is sometimes tempted to look 
back with yearning to that great day in the 
history of our race, in the history of the whole 
world, when it was ruled by the Teutoburg wood 
that there should be a free Germany to plant a 
free England and a free England to plant a free 
America. Nay, he may even sometimes cast a 
backward glance to that premature wandering of 
our kinsfolk which was checked by the arm of 
the yeoman of Arpinum, when the eagle of Kome, 
the eagle of Marius, first spread her wings over 
the field of Aquse Sextise. All that is purely 
Greek, all that is purely Roman, he will school 
himself to forego ; the historian of Teutonic 
nations and Teutonic laws cannot afibrd wholly 
to shut up his Tacitus, his Strabo, and his Caesar ; 
but he must turn away, with however heavy a 
heart, from the widest and deepest teaching that 
ever came from the pen of one who set down 
the records of deeds in which he himself had 
played his part. To his "ancient" colleague he 
must give up the man of varied experience and 



HISTOKICAL PROFESSOE. 51 

varied thought, the man who looked at his own 
age with the eyes of an historian of all ages, 
the man who bore the urn of Philopoimen and 
who stood heside the flames of Carthage, Poly- 
bios surveyor and teacher of the world. 

And now for a word as to the immediate choice 
and treatment of subjects and texts among all 
that fill the ages since the tremendous sound of 
the Gothic trumpet was heard within the Salarian 
gate. Till our whole system is recast, the best 
thing that can be done for sound learning in the 
department in which I am called to give my help 
will be to ^:k. as far as may be the energies of 
those who devote themselves to the so-called 
"modern" school on those periods which can 
be treated most nearly after the sound fashion 
of the old school of Litercs Humaniores. That 
school did not make a man a philosopher, a 
philologer, or an historian, but it gave him the 
best possible start towards making himself any 
one of the three. In my long past character 
of Examiner in the School of Modern History 

E 2 



52 THE OFFICE OF THE 

I always noticed the great advantage enjoyed 
by those who had gone through the discipline 
of the elder school, not merely in the amount 
of knowledge that they brought with them, but 
in the habits of mind which they had gained, 
habits which enabled them to do justice to later 
periods as well as to earlier. Among the fourteen 
centuries which we have just taken as our special 
heritage, some times adapt themselves far better 
than others to the acquisition of sound and scholar- 
like habits of thought and judgement. I can con- 
ceive nothing more utterly opposed to sound 
learning, nothing which more thoroughly deserves 
the name of building without a foundation, than 
the fashion of rushing off at once to the most 
recent times, to controversial times, to times for 
which the original authorities are so endless that, 
for ordinary University study, it comes to the 
same thing as having no original authorities at 
all. For it is quite certain that in nearly every 
case the professed study of very modern times will 
mean something other than the real and thorough 



HISTORICAL PKOFESSOR. ^^ 

study of original authorities. The last recorded 
event in the newspapers is indeed part of the history 
of the world. It may be, and it should be, studied 
in a truly historic spirit. We who have seen 
the union of Germany and Italy, who have seen 
the new birth of the nations of south-eastern 
Europe, have lived in an age almost as rich in 
great events and great changes as the age of 
Polybios or the age of Procopius. Only there 
is this objection to making our own age a direct 
subject of University study that there is as yet 
no Polybios or Procopius in whom to study it. 
Indeed the whole range of the last two or three 
centuries of European history is surely far better 
suited for private study, for the wider profes- 
sorial teaching, than it is to be made a direct 
subject of enforced work to be tested by exami- 
nation. Knowledge of those times may well be 
no less solid in itself than knowledge of any 
earlier time; but solid knowledge of them is 
not likely to be reached early in life, nor can 
it be so easily tested by examination as know- 



54 THE OFFICE OF THE 

ledge of earlier times. The excessive devotion 
to very modern periods which seems to have 
set in within the last ten years or so seems 
to me to be an evil in every way. It widens 
the partition which it should be our first work 
to break down ; it is more likely than the study 
of earlier times to gender to shallowness and 
mere talk; it savours of the notion which was 
afloat a generation back that it was well to 
bring in "modern" history as an "easier" study 
than the severe labours of the elder school. As 
far as I may have any influence, official or 
personal, that influence will be given to at- 
tempting to show that "modern" history is 
at least no more easy than "ancient." I shall 
do all that in me lies to discourage the de- 
lusive study of what are called "subjects" and 
"periods/' and to do all that one man can do 
to bring back the sound and old-fashioned study 
of "books." The first foundation of learning is 
the mastery of original texts. That must come 
fii-st ; there is much for the student himself, much 



HISTOEICAL PROFESSOE. ^^ 

for the tutor and the professor, to add in the 
way of comment and illustration and comparison 
of text with text. But knowledge of a man's books 
is the beginning, tlie foundation, the absolutely 
needful thing, without which all the rest is vanity. 
The great difficulty is to persuade people that 
there really are original authorities for what are 
called "mediaeval" times, exactly in the same way 
that it is allowed that there are original authorities 
for what are called " classical " times. I remember 
well how hard a saying this seemed in the days 
when "modern" history was brought in as some- 
thing which might be learned in modern English 
and French books that were pleasant to read, 
and needed no painful mastery of writings in the 
Greek and Latin tongues — the yet more terrible 
Old-French and Old-English were as yet hardly 
thought of. By this time some at least have 
found out that both Western and Eastern Europe 
can show no lack of original writers for the 
history of days since the fifth century, writers 
who in their way deserve as much to be studied 



^6 THE OFFICE OF THE 

as the original authorities of earlier days. By 
this time it may not sound wholly a paradox to 
say that the two cannot be studied so profitably 
as when they are studied side by side, that the 
mind is far more widened, that the historic 
judgement is far more strengthened, by the study 
of the two side by side than by the study of 
either singly. 

It is now high time that I should tell you in 
what way I propose to carry on the work which 
I have this day begun, what shape I mean to give 
to my first ofiicial contribution to historical learn- 
ing. My notion is, if I find support enough in 
the University to carry out the scheme, to keep 
going, through at least part of the year, two 
distinct courses of lectures of difierent kinds. One 
course may well consist of lectures of a more 
general kind, written or spoken, lectures which 
I venture to hope may be interesting and profitable 
even to those who have not specially given them- 
selves to minute historical study. Alongside of 
these I hope I may find encouragement enough 



HISTOKICAL PROFESSOK. 57 

to enable me to carry on courses of lectures of 
a more minute kind on the texts of original 
writers. These will be for special students of 
history, and to them I would bid any, of what- 
ever standing, who may be willing to try whether 
it is not possible to work in the same solid and 
thorough way at a writer in the Greek or Latin 
of a later age as it confessedly is to work at 
writers in the earlier forms of the same tongues. 
In the present term I propose, for the more 
general course, to give a series of lectures on the 
methods of historical study; in another term I hope 
to follow this up with a general course on the 
great periods of history. After these introductory 
courses I trust to go on with others of a more 
special kind on the history of our own land, of 
the Empire in East and West, of Sicily, of any 
other part of our great subject which may be 
found expedient. As the first stage in the more 
minute series, I propose to begin during the present 
term with the Frankish History of Gregory of 
Tours. He is, I find, the earliest writer recom- 



58 THE OFFICE OF THE 

mended for candidates in the School of Modern 
History. I fear that he is not one of those who 
are most commonly taken up. I was tempted to 
begin with some earlier writers, with some who not 
only recorded the events of the fifth century, but 
who actually lived in it. Above all, I was tempted 
to begin with Sidonius ApoUinaris, courtier, bishop, 
panegyrist, and saint. But the writings of Sido- 
nius, precious as they are as illustrations of history, 
are not themselves in strictness historical writings. 
And if we are to make any distinction, even under 
protest, we must reckon the purely Roman Sido- 
nius among the latest of ancient writers, while 
Gregory, not Frankish certainly, but yet not wholly 
Roman, may be fairly looked on as opening the 
mediaeval series. With him then I will begin. I 
choose him for his own sake, and I choose him 
for a further motive. When we have well seen 
what the Frankish Conquest of Gaul was, we shall 
be better able to understand by contrast the true 
nature of the English Conquest of Britain. 

I have chalked out a scheme for the steady 



HISTOKICAL PEOFESSOR. 59 

work of at least a year. How and how far that 
scheme can be carried out depends partly on the 
Professor himself, partly on the University at 
large. My object will be gained, my reward 
will be won, if I can succeed in bringing any 
considerable number of members of the University, 
of whatever standing, to join with me in the 
study of those ages which begin with the settle- 
ment of our own and of kindred races in the 
lands which some of them still hold, as a subject 
no less worthy than the study of the ages that 
went before them, as a study which cannot be 
worthily followed if it is kept wholly apart from 
the study of the ages which went before them. 
To fellowship with me in that attempt I bid any 
who feel a call to learning as an object to be 
sought for its own sake and who feel a special call 
to research in that particular branch of learning. 
But remember that it is to the pursuit of learning 
for its own sake that I would call them. I call them 
to the pursuit of knowledge, the pursuit of truth, 
to that learning which is said to be better than 



6o THE OFFICE OF THE 

house and land, but which perhaps is not the path 
best adapted for the winning of houses and lands. 
And if it is better than house and land, it is also, 
I presume, better than classes and fellowships, 
though I presume also that it will be found to be 
at least not a hindrance to the winning of classes 
and fellowships. I only give the warning that mj 
work here will have no immediate reference to 
the winning of classes and fellowships. I am 
put here to do what can be done by one man who 
cannot have many years to do it in, for the promo- 
tion of historic truth for its own sake. Or, if there 
is any object beyond, higher than, the search after 
truth for its own sake, it will be the hope that our 
studies of the past may be found to have after all 
their use in the living present, that we may at 
least not play our part the worse in the public life 
of our own day if we carry about us a clear 
knowledge of those earlier forms of public life out 
of which our own has grown. We shall surely not 
be the less at home in our own generation, if we 
bear in mind that we are the heirs and scholars of 



HISTORICAL PROFESSOR. 6l 

the generations that went before us, if we now and 
then stop in our own course to thank the memory 
of those without whom our own course could not 
have been run, if we are ready, at every fitting 
moment, to "praise famous men and our fathers 
that begat us," 



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